


Extinction Comedy

by Fly



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: #freeSephiroth, BORN TO DIE PLANET IS A FUCK KILL EM ALL 0022 I am swords man 410757864530 DEAD PEOPLE, Celebrity Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII), Closeted Character, Cloud Strife midlife crisis, Cloud is on bad terms with his exes, Dark Comedy, Deathfic, End of the World, F/M, Global Warming, Inspired by Hell Year 2016, Loss of Identity, Loss of Powers, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Metafiction, Sephiroth's increasingly poor cameo appearances as a metaphor for something or other, Slow Build, can't spell CLOUD without OLD, dirtbag left, reality breakdown, references to Final Fantasy lore, the Planet dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23635549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fly/pseuds/Fly
Summary: The Planet's resources have been extracted, and its climate is destroyed. The wind stops, the sea is wild, the earth begins to rot, and the Summoned Monsters are tearing the world apart. Cloud Strife, whose hairline hasn't receded that much yet, leaves his mental health facility to go on a journey, and stops en route for a burger.Incomplete.
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough/Cloud Strife, Cloud Strife/Barret Wallace, Sephiroth/Cloud Strife, Tifa Lockhart/Cloud Strife, Yuffie Kisaragi/Cloud Strife, Yuffie Kisaragi/Original Character(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	Extinction Comedy

**Author's Note:**

> "HELLO! Please take another look at the warnings if you haven’t already. This is a story about the death of the Planet and, while this fanfic is intended to be an absurd comedy, it is also an unhappy story in which everybody loses. **This is deathfic** ; these characters you love enough to be looking for fanfic about are not going to get out alive, and they know it. That’s not to say this is whump, or an outright grimfest - there’s some really silly bits with Gilgamesh in it towards the end - but if this is something that’s going to cause more anguish than enjoyment, then trust your instincts."
> 
>   
> 
> 
> "While it’s an idea I’ve had in my head since 2009 or so, I planned it at the beginning of 2017, the year immediately after 2016; it’s a work of that moment and with all it implies. I was trying to deal with a lot of new political contexts while also going through some rough personal and mental health stuff. With the Remake on the cards, I was thinking about the idea of a Cloud who’d aged in line with the time between the original game and now; I originally wanted him to be 41, but decided to age him down to mid-30s because 41 was too on-the-nose ‘mid-life crisis’."

For some reason, Cloud found himself going into a roadside fast food restaurant on his way to the Mideel docks. The parking lot had nothing in it beside a smashed hubcap, and even the torn plastic bags on the trees hung motionless in the still air. He opened the door to a blast of astringent pop music and disinfectant; the vinyl on the stools had been so cooked by the sunlight that they were sweating mineral oil.

Cloud, like most woke types, didn’t eat the kind of stuff served by places like this these days; but he could still smell the food from the Sanitarium, as raw and sanctimonious as eating grass, seeping out of his pores. He went to the counter and ordered a Korean BBQ Burger with crispy fries and an extra-large caramel milkshake.

“I’m glad someone came today,” the manager said to him, a girl of about twenty with a lot of earrings. She looked at him with a bright smile, then tucked some of her hair behind her ear, as if she was trying to catch his eye - Cloud guessed more out of boredom than attraction, but allowed it to go to his head anyway. “Most people are staying indoors like the news says to, I guess, so I let all the other guys go home. That’s why the TV’s off, I can turn it back on if you want.”

Cloud set his tray down at the table nearest to the counter, unwrapped his burger, and bit into it.

“Mm. No, it’s fine,” he said. He set his phone on the table next to him, turned its screen on, and reflexively scrolled through another thirty hideous images of riots and fire and misery, and another fifty stupid opinions about them, without knowing why he was doing it. He turned the screen off and looked back up at her.

“You know, I thought I’d picked a bad time to be in my early twenties,” he said, feeling the responsibility to say something, or at least the desire to explain things to himself. “People my age lived through what the Shinra did. We stared Meteor in the face, knowing what was coming. And then it didn’t, so we never had to learn anything. We all lost our memories.”

“Aw,” the girl said, bending over in the sort of way that reminded him of Aerith, “it’s not like it was your fault Meteor was summoned.”

Cloud dipped a fry in his milkshake, stirred it, and thoughtfully sucked it clean.

“You know how everyone’s always, like, ‘where were you when you first saw Meteor? Did you start praying? Did you cry? Did you spend all your money?’ That sort of thing?”

“Of course, yeah.”

“All I remember was I couldn’t play outside. I think they tried to explain it to me once or twice but I guess I just kind of assumed it would all be OK, you know? But I can remember everything about when Weapon came down. It was the hugest thing I’d ever seen. And with that sword in its hand, so big no person could ever hold it… it still shows up in my dreams, sometimes.”

Cloud didn’t have any reason to correct her about the sword. “You grew up in Mideel?”

“Yeah,” she said. “People always make a thing about how hard we got hit, but I grew up playing in the Lifestream pools until they built over everything... I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything, you know what I’m saying?”

Cloud nodded. “I don’t remember Mideel from before either. I only visited once before that happened, and my mind was somewhere else at the time.”

He tightened his shoulders in the ghost of a shrug of a SOLDIER 1st Class, before licking some escaped barbecue sauce off the pad of his thumb. After sensitising his palette for years with conscious food, all those natural whole foods and carbon-sink legumes, the acids and salt and saccharine sizzled like putting his tongue to a battery; his spine curled with sadomasochistic enthusiasm. All things eaten involved the sacrifice of a life, but the whole people-punishing, carbon-farting industrial chain that made this burger was a sacrifice of the possibility of life itself, just to give him this supernormal moment of pleasure. Like carving a scar on your lover’s thigh, the plastic wrap he tore off that thing would exist on this Planet forever. He was going to eat like this forever from now on, and the Planet and his body could bloat and rot.

“Mm,” he said, glancing up and realising she’d been watching him. “Yeah, the food here’s alright.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you have the most amazing eyes?”

Cloud looked up. She was leaning on the counter with her arms extended fully, peering down at him. Yeah, time to shut this thing down. Flirting with someone too young to remember Mako exploitation made him feel about a billion years old and was absolutely not going to happen.

“My girlfriend used to tell me that,” he said. “They used to be even weirder, I mean. They changed as I got into my 30s. Anyway, I’ve got to get a move on, I’m working on -”

“I’ve seen eyes like yours before, somewhere, haven’t I?” the young woman asked him, brightening. “You’re - are you Cloud?”

Cloud tilted his head towards the window, to make sure he’d properly put on a gracious expression, and was preparing to say something dismissive when he looked up and stopped. Her face was drained of colour. Her skin had an odd sheen to it; not the same sweat that poured off everyone in the permanent heatwave, but something oily and almost twinkling, like the sheen of preened feathers.

“ _He who carries Jenova’s cells, and the legacy of stolen valour_ ,” she said, and sat down on the floor, her mop clattering down. It wasn’t a conscious motion; it looked as if someone had severed a string holding her up.

For what felt like a long time, their eyes locked, and Cloud could feel her mortal terror even before she dragged her knees towards her face, clutching at her head with unarticulated fingers.

Cloud ran over to her.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, squatting down to her level. Her body arched in a seizure, and he held onto her shoulders, trying to stop her from bashing her head against the floor. Something about her was indistinct under his palm, almost formless in the same way as sand. “I know how much it hurts.”

A tear rolled down the crease of her nose. “I’m fine - don’t call the hospital, they’ll tell my line manager and…”

A white flash tore through both of them - a hiss that struck like a synthesised bell. She froze, mouth open and silent, wide eyes, the film on them shimmering as she wept.

“What’s he… doing in me?”

Her hand gripped into the crook of his elbow and squeezed.

Cloud swallowed. There wasn’t going to be much more time.

“Keterah,” he said, checking her name badge. “Keterah, listen. It’s just because I’m here, it’s got nothing to do with you. He makes it feel like it’s your fault, but you can’t listen!”

“I’m trying but there’s all this… this…” 

“I’ll help you,” he told her. “You’ll have to hang on but I promise I will help you. You shouldn’t be involved. I’m sorry more than I can say.”

“…dis… dis… dis… spair.”

The air in the entire world turned clear black.

“I have brought it for you, Cloud,” Sephiroth said, blades of silver hair flowing over his chest from under his fast-food snapback. Black velvet feathers ran themselves against Cloud’s bones. “We are now both standing at the end of the world. We can both feel its slowing pulse. I have returned from death into this hopeless eschaton so that you will have to die thinking of me.”

With the wing spread, Sephiroth filled up a lot more of the room than Keterah had done. The light from the windows filtered in dusty shafts through fingers of blue-black. Cloud, making sure his face was closed off, stood up, walked back over to his seat, picked up the burger, and set about finishing it.

“You were reborn once from the flow of Lifestream in the waters around Mideel,” Sephiroth carried on, his voice a little more pointed than usual. “How appropriate that I, too, was reborn from this girl, whose forgotten childhood in Mideel led her body to be -”

“Shut up,” Cloud said. He took out his wallet, and counted out a tip. “I can’t express how not interested I am in your shit right now. Can’t you tell I’m in the middle of something important?”

* * *

“My life had been created to carry Shinra with my body, to spread its gospel with my words, to sacrifice myself for its plan.”

Sephiroth was floating along behind Cloud at an unpleasant distance, a raised, scolding finger of shadow in the hazy air. Cloud turned his head back down towards the dunes and ignored him.

“The celebrity, you see, Cloud, is closer to the divine than others. The quality of fame is that it makes a person less Flesh and more Word. The Ancients say that the almighty God bent the bodies of His own angels into his chariot and throne, and had them sing a neverending song of His holiness; no matter what glory each angel had been given, it was entirely in the service of the promotion of His brand. But,” a dangerous tremble edged Sephiroth’s words, “when you rendered me dead, I saw the possibility of being reborn as a brand, to rule over this Planet.”

“Just shut up!” Cloud snarled, whirling around to face Sephiroth, whose eyes glittered with delight at the attention. “We’ve done this whole thing a couple of times every year for the last… decade, maybe more, and every time I beat you. You died and became a ‘brand’, right? So all you can do is carry on doing the same routine, well beyond the point where anyone can take you seriously.” He made a noise of disgust, and carried on walking. “And the reason I’m not looking at you is because you’re dressed in stupid clothes, like you work in a fast food restaurant or something.”

The oxygen around Cloud was sucked away as Sephiroth drifted in behind him, large and solid, without so much as a rustle of feathers. His face hovered besides Cloud, from over his left shoulder. He seemed to be walking along by foot like a normal person, if you weren’t too choosy about whether his feet actually touched the ground or not.

“Unlike you, Cloud, I am honest in the expression of my own absurdity. The Shinra made nothing that was not absurd. Any world created by them deserves only the most ridiculous God.”

“And the world they made is ending!” Cloud said. “It’s done for! It’s the End, it’s Ragnarok, it’s the big one. It’s what everyone’s been praying to keep away since the beginning. It’s worse than what you were trying to do! It’s a whole lot, is what I mean. So if you’re gonna become God, you should go for it. Have fun for a couple of weeks.”

He reached the top of the hill, and was slightly gratified to feel Sephiroth’s shoulders stiffen. The sea ahead of them was a great, blinding sheet, throwing the agonising heat back in Cloud’s face. Occasionally, through it, you could see a glimpse of a building that had been on the flat before the seas rose up; a weathervane Cloud kept thinking he’d seen before on a delivery or something, but he couldn’t remember what the building underneath it had looked like.

“This Planet is in turmoil,” Sephiroth said, in the same empty tone he said everything in, but Cloud could feel his confusion in the short circuit between their brains. “Two thousand years of your ancestors scarring its body for meaningless gain... and finally, its anger is directed at its slavers.”

“Yeah,” Cloud shrugged, “I’m sure if we’d left it to you, the Planet’d be better off.”

He started down the dune, walking between root clumps of sickly marram grass and barnacle-spattered stumps that had been trees inland a couple of years ago. The emergency seaport, a skinny white prefab structure on puckered, inflatable floats, had the entrance chained off, decorated with a metal sign reading CLOSED DUE TO LEVIATHAN ISSUES. Cloud carried on; walking on that thing always gave him motion sickness anyway.

“What a sight it is to see your unburdened back,” Sephiroth said. He even smelled amazing, even now; Keterah’s girly vanilla-cupcakes perfume twinkling around a core of something so utterly filthy that it was almost sweet, decomposition and sex that seemed to be tickling out from him on fronds of featherdown. “I haven’t seen you without a sword since the first time you killed me.”

“I don’t need a sword any more,” said Cloud. “It wouldn’t make any difference.”

“You claim you have no desire to kill me? Tell me: What it would take to make you -”

Cloud raised a hand. “Your body doesn’t even belong to you. I need to keep it safe so you can give it back.”

“So you would let your enemy walk free for the sake of guarding the body of an unremarkable girl you don’t even know.”

Cloud picked up his pace, discarded plastic fishing gear and drinks cans crunching under his steps. “You just don’t get it,” he said, not particularly caring if Sephiroth could hear, “you still just don’t get it. I wonder if you ever did.”

* * *

  
There was a shack further along the bay; the man inside heard Cloud’s knock and told him to go away.

“There’s not going to be any boats,” he shouted through the door, “have you seen Leviathan? Even the Sea Chocobos won’t go out there.”

“’The wind stops, the sea is wild, and the earth begins to rot’,” Sephiroth said, eyeing Cloud significantly. Cloud sighed. The media had been comparing the situation to the fairy tale since this all started, and he had expected Sephiroth would have had more intelligent commentary on the situation than a nerd clickbait blog.

“Do you still have that old hover thing you used to use for crabs?” Cloud asked. “Or did you get rid of it when they died off?”

“Is that Cloud?” the man said, pulling the door open. “Hey, it’s been years. You on a delivery?”

“Yeah,” Cloud said, “the last thing I’m ever going to collect. I need to get off the island immediately - I don’t have the luxury of waiting for the sea to get angrier. I need to get North, fast. Can you take me further South so -”

“That’s not going to work,” the fisherman said, “it doesn’t make much sense that it ever worked in the first place, being honest with you. I can take you to the continent, but you’ll have to go around the long way. Are you going there with, uh... Keterah?”

Cloud looked resentfully at Sephiroth. “Probably. If I left him here, he’d just stir up trouble and it’d be my fault. Though depending on how he makes me feel I’ll probably push him overboard on the way, not that it’d do any good.”

“This living body is quite a good fit,” Sephiroth cut in, leaning his long forearm against the frame of the door. “Could you detect a single cell that has not been placed to correctly accommodate my will?”

The fisherman’s eyes raked across where the woman’s polo shirt strained across Sephiroth’s muscles, and the cheap red and yellow fast food snapback.

“Well, that’s one good thing about living nowadays; people are more free to be who they are, I think. I’ll get the hybrid out of the garage - I think I’ve even got some Mako cells for it lying about somewhere, though they might have gone off.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Cloud said, “I’ll keep that secret from the WRO.”

“Of course you will. Anything’s got to be better than sitting around staring at the news, it’s really getting me down. By the way, Cloud, I like that you haven’t changed your hair. But, aren’t you getting a little -”

“I’m not too old for anything,” Cloud said. “Thirties is better than early twenties in every way. Shame about everything else around me, though.”

* * *

Sephiroth was standing in the bottom of the hovercraft, while Cloud was kneeling in front of the thrust. He tilted his head forward and backward, sizing up Cloud like an owl unsure as to the distance between itself and a mouse.

“What are you staring at?” Cloud demanded. He was driving, and yet he was still nauseous. It wasn’t motion sickness, but flicker vertigo; every time the craft’s elderly motor bounced it a little, the water flashed in the white-hot heat from the sun, and the flickering was at a frequency that felt timed to the stem of his own brain. Closing his eyes just made everything strobe yellow-pink instead.

“I exist outside of time,” he said. “And the Lifestream, in her rage, strips from me all memory but my recollections of you.” He exhaled. “You aren’t ageing well.”

“Better than being forever stuck in your 20s,” Cloud shot back.

“I see, in crystal frames, the changes in your face. The process of how your expressions become inscribed as lines.”

“Yeah,” Cloud said, “I get a bunch of new ones every time you show up.”

“And these scars -”

The craft lurched as Sephiroth’s hand shot out and gripped Cloud’s wrist. His hands, under blue nitrile food prep gloves, were as cold as a corpse’s.

“No mark on your palm,” he murmured, turning Cloud’s hand over and examining it like a fortune teller. Cloud pulled his hands back and wrapped them back around the tiller, surprised to realise that Sephiroth hadn’t particularly resisted. “It is rare for a mark left by a cursed sword to heal. Every time I think it is only vanity which leads me to finding such vapour as you interesting, I remember that you are, actually, removed from ordinary humans. You are a Warrior blessed by the Light.”

“Warrior of Light... You think I’ve got a plan to save the Planet, haven’t you?” Cloud said. “From the Sea becoming wild and all that stuff? Well, first of all, I don’t have one, and second of all, just read my mind and get it over with.”

“This scar on your third finger -” Cloud shuddered with embarrassment that he’d seen it - “- what was that?”

Cloud made sure his hand was gripping the tiller completely. “Cosmo Canyon, the Planet-Witnessing festival, in oh-oh-twelve. Yuffie had a tattoo gun from somewhere. She was drawing little moons and stars on the hipsters and solarpunks for like 5k a pop. When I asked her if she knew what was doing, she said she’d give me one for free so long as I didn’t rat her out to the Elders.”

“A tattoo of a zero,” Sephiroth said. “You relish your own pain like nobody else can.”

“It’s a Planet! Not a zero,” Cloud lied. The ink had faded completely after about six months; Yuffie had told him it was his fault for not doing his research. In the end he’d decided not to bother getting it touched up, instead getting Barret to put him in touch with his artist and getting some better ink done elsewhere.

“Was I...”

“Yeah,” Cloud said, “I was waiting for you to remember. You made it all about one of your stupid plans to destroy the Planet, again. That time, you’d convinced the restless spirits of the Gi that if they followed you, they could have back everything that was taken from them.”

Sephiroth’s face registered no recognition. “Did I do that?”

“You desecrated Seto’s tomb - you led an army of skeletons, right out of the earth - even the flames of the Candle were turned to stone - ”

“Interesting. I don’t remember doing that at all,” Sephiroth said, his perpetual, beatific smile faltering for a second. “And you must have defeated me, and yet…”

“You’re really losing it,” Cloud said.

The Lifestream’s knowledge thundering into your consciousness was like staring into the sun; Cloud knew the way it left the inside of your mind feeling like running your tongue over a mouthful of knocked-out teeth. He could empathise with the whole idea of not being able to remember a fight he must have lost - a feeling that took him back to his twenties.

“Perhaps, but for now there is still something left of me. Tell me how I died.”

“I think I’ll let you experience the sense of mystery,” Cloud said, with a withering smile. “You can wonder and never know the answer until everything seems hollow and meaningless, especially you. Maybe it’ll help you understand how it feels.”


End file.
